Various Observations On Life

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I was reading through the random blogs on the Freshly Pressed page last night when I came across one called My iPod is Making Me Crazy and had to click on it. It was about the randomness of people’s playlists nowadays thanks to the shuffle feature on our mp3 players. This got me thinking about how random my own playlist was and I decided to keep track of the first 25 songs.

I made up some rules to follow while doing this. One, I couldn’t skip anything that came on. Two, I wasn’t allowed to write down the song and then skip to the next one because I didn’t know if that would influence the mp3 player’s song choice or not. Three, I couldn’t lie no matter how stupid the song was that came on. The fact that I had to implement this rule ahead of time should be some kind of indication as to what kind of music could be contained on my 8 gig player.

So without further adieu, I give you the first 25 songs of my day:

1. Science Fiction Double Feature – Rocky Horror Glee Show Soundtrack. Yes, I love Glee and I do own all the soundtracks the have shot out onto the shelves in the last year and a half. As sad as that may be, I totally enjoy them. I love Rocky Horror and when they announced they were doing an episode based on it, I nearly danced with joy. It is one of the only girly things I do and I think that I’m allowed one or two.

2. Get It On Tonight – Montell Jordon. Immediate flashbacks to high school, riding around in a friend’s older sister’s car with this song cranked up so loud they had to roll the windows down.

3. I Will Buy You a New Life – Everclear. I love this song and miss this band. However, I cringe every time the singer rhymes new with the word…new. I will buy you a new car, perfect shiny and new? No…please use anything other than the same word. I always thought it should be blue.

4. Winter Born (This Sacrifice) – The Cruxshadows. I love this song. Its dramatic and dark and different but still not so very deep and scary goth that I run away. The boyfriend played me this song about a year and a half ago and I then immediately scoured the internet, searching for more and loving almost everything I found. It’s a lot of mythology themed stuff and for some reason, I really dig that.

6. So Help Me Girl – Joe Diffie. Yes, you caught me. I like country music. I grew up in a place where it’s common to see people walking around with cowboy hats and giant belt buckles that say “Git R Done”. No one can escape it forever…believe me, I tried.

7. Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill) – Wyclef Jean ft. Akon, Niia and Lil Wayne. I know, I try to avoid any songs with people singing who have names that start with “Lil” as a general rule. However, the Dollar Bill part of the song is just so catchy that I find myself using it in daily life. I now hang my head in shame.

8. Disenchanted – My Chemical Romance. This was from The Black Parade album. It actually brings back memories of seeing My Chemical Romance live at our local arena. They played this song and said they were working on it for their newest album. I remember being disappointed later when I listened to it because I liked it so much better than the album they were touring when I saw them live.

9. Heart Heart Heartbreak – Boys Like Girls. I have no story for this one, it’s just really catchy.

10. Over My Head – The Fray. Again, no story. I just like the little background beat. It makes me bob my head.

11. Walking on the Sun – Smash Mouth. I always likened the sound of this song to something that Austin Powers would totally groove to. It’s just got that feeling to it.

12. Creep – TLC. Ah, Crazy Sexy Cool. One of the first CD’s I ever owned and I still have it, somewhere in the basement collecting dust. It was probably far more mature themed than my mother actually realized when she gave it to me for Christmas, but then again, I also got Smash by The Offspring that year from my aunt, despite the parental warnings of explicit lyrics. So I’m thinking that my parents didn’t really care all that much as long as I behaved myself.

13. Help! – The Beatles. It’s The Beatles. They require no explanation.

14. Tomorrow Never Dies – Sheryl Crow. Always picture the entire opening scene of the movie when I hear this. I love Bond songs, they’re always just so great and get you right in the mood for the movie.

15. Follow You Down – Gin Blossoms. Not my fave song from them. I prefer Till I Hear It From You off the Empire Records soundtrack, but this is a pretty good one as well. I recently heard a tidbit on the radio that they may be making a comeback and whilst perusing Wikipedia, found out that they indeed released a new album last fall.

16. Wake Up – Three Days Grace. I’m always happy when I hear something on the radio that totally rocks and it turns out to be a Canadian band. These guys rock and they proved it when I saw them in concern with Work Stacey last year. It was a great time.

17. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – Sarah McLachlan. Yes…I am one of those sad people that has yet to have managed to get the Christmas music off of my mp3 player and it is now mid February. One year I left the Christmas tree up until August and only took it down because I moved so I figure I’m not doing to bad on this.

18. Cold Day In July – Dixie Chicks. I love the Dixie Chicks. In my eyes, they can do no wrong and when all that crap went down in the press because of one innocent statement, I was behind them all the way. Then, when they released the documentary “Shut Up and Sing”, it was awesome. Even the boyfriend liked it and he is so not a fan of country music.

19. I am Stretched on Your Grave – Abney Park. This is a band from the steam punk genre. I love it…it’s dark and twisty and so very different. They’ve got violin, a male and female vocalist and a song about the zombie apocalypse. What more could you ask for?

20. The Hand That Feeds (DFA Mix) – Nine Inch Nails. This one is the boyfriend’s doing. He’s a HUGE fanboy of Trent Reznor and all his works so when we started dating, he’d sit me down and I’d listen to all the songs, get the explanations about what they meant, stories behind the albums and everything. Eventually, I started to really like it all as well and genuinely like pretty much everything he does now too.

21. Nobody’s Daughter – Hole. The boyfriend has a not so secret celebrity crush on Courtney Love back in the day. So when her new album came out last year, it was a must buy for him. I ended up loving it a lot. It’s a great CD and I listen to it quite frequently.

22. Bootylicious – Destiny’s Child. Sometimes I forget that Beyonce wasn’t always just Beyonce. I remember the days of Destiny’s Child. This song was my favourite one they did.

23. Who Says You Can’t Go Home? – Bon Jovi. I freaking LOVE Bon Jovi. My mother raised me on four or five different albums from different artists and the Blaze of Glory album for the Young Guns II soundtrack was one of them. I killed that tape. Like Meat Loaf and Tiffany, it died a horrible death, finally chewed up by my tape player, refusing be be played any longer. I finally got to see Bon Jovi live in Toronto in 2008 and it was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to. It was the most expensive and worth every penny. When the opening notes of Blaze of Glory sounded across the stadium…I have to say I felt all tingly.

24. Through With You – Maroon 5. Yeah, they appear a lot on my mp3 player.

25. Lightening Crashes – Live. Nice. Rounding out the list with a classic song from the 90’s. This was the one that everyone danced to at school dances and it was just so intense and deep. It’s always one of those songs that takes me directly back to high school.

I used to love television. I used to know the schedule of all my favourite shows, what time they were playing on which day and I was totally absorbed in many different story lines in many different shows and eagerly looked forward to each one. My friends knew who to ask when they had questions about past plot lines and how they had led to the present and I could explain it to them so they were caught up and ready for that week’s upcoming episode.

That was back when I was in high school (yes, I was just that cool). Back when I would never leave the house on a Sunday night, nor would I accept any phone calls between the hours of 9 and 10 because I was immersed in the world of Mulder and Scully (Oh yes, I was one of THOSE kind of nerds).

This is a visual representation of my dedication to TV during my teen years...sadly, it's pretty accurate

When I moved out of my parents’ house at the age of 19, I watched less television. This was mostly due to the fact that I had to share the TV with at least three roommates (one year, it was up to five). This creates very strict scheduling necessities and discussions about what shows will be watched on what nights by whom.

I will say, from the time I moved out, we had time shifting on the cable, but PVR was not available for about five years after that up here, so that was not an option.

I shaved the list of shows I religiously watched down to about five, easy to do since they all corresponded with shows that various other roommates were watching.

Over the years, various reasons came about for the list of dedicated shows to grow smaller and smaller. Buffy ended and a year later, Angel was also gone. I disliked the direction that Grey’s Anatomy took and reality TV was just simply getting annoying and predictable.

Over the years I stuck with my few shows and mostly movies and then when I met the boyfriend, I discovered that he was not an avid fan of fictional television. He loved reality TV. When I moved in, in an unspoken and unintentional compromise, I gave up pretty much all of my television shows aside from a couple sitcoms (I also recently picked up Glee and adore it) and he gave up most of his reality television except the ones that I would watch with him. So together, we had Survivor and Hell’s Kitchen to look forward to every week and I would watch my fiction shows, for the most part, alone.

A year passed and I was heading to a friend’s house once a week to watch Glee and pre-recorded episodes (PVR had finally arrived!) of How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory. The boyfriend and I had given up on watching everything but Survivor on the television, instead catching up with them a few episodes at a time streamed online.

I found myself resenting cable’s presence in our lives more and more, strictly for the fact that it was there, there was television, but I tended to always find there to be nothing to watch. I would put National Geographic channel on in the background while I surfed the net, but I wasn’t paying any attention to it half the time.

So we assessed the situation and some very serious discussions about it (ie. I asked the boyfriend if he cared about cable and he was like…meh). So finally, decision made. Cable went away for good.

It’s been two weeks since the big step towards freedom and I haven’t noticed a huge loss in my life. There have only been a few times where I though, “Gee, I’d really like to watch [insert random show title here]” and then I’d realize that was not possible and find something else to do. The only thing that has happened that made me actually wish we’d waited a month was the fact that I found out I would be missing Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

Somehow, though sharks terrify me and have since childhood, I LOVE Shark Week

The best thing about having no cable to pop on in the background when we’re eating meals or bored? We are FINALLY working our way through the backlog of television shows that we keep buying on DVD but never watch. We’re almost finished with My Pet Monster and will be moving on to complete the first season of She-Ra next.

This was my fave cartoon as a child. I used to run around with a plastic sword and pretend that I was She-Ra.